In a re-evaluation of Hockett's foundational features that have long dominated linguistic theory—concepts like "arbitrariness," "duality of patterning," and "displacement"—an international team of linguists and cognitive scientists shows that modern science demands a radical shift in how we understand language and how it evolved.
The conclusion? Language is not a spoken code. It's a dynamic, multimodal, socially embedded system that evolves through interaction, culture, and meaning-making.
Lvxferre [he/him] - 2w
A few of those developments are well consistent with what people already knew; it's only a matter of tidying it up into a new or updated framework, and that's what the paper is trying to.
For example. Hockett puts some "hard" barrier between human language and non-human communication. Nowadays we know it's more like a gradient; like, we can agree something like the song of a whale is not language yet, but closer to it than the whimper of a dog, right?
Multimodality (or: how human language uses multiple channels at the same time, not just audio) is also something a bit obvious. Specially for those from cultures where gestures are common; you can convey multiple meanings through the same voice sentence, depending on the gestures and expressions you use.
Challenges outdated textbook narratives that equate language with speech.
Speaking on that: it always makes me roll my eyes when people compare sign languages with dancing bees. That's as silly as comparing voice languages with crickets, for roughly the same reasons.
cm0002 in linguistics
A 65-year-old linguistics framework challenged by modern research
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-year-linguistics-framework-modern.htmlA few of those developments are well consistent with what people already knew; it's only a matter of tidying it up into a new or updated framework, and that's what the paper is trying to.
For example. Hockett puts some "hard" barrier between human language and non-human communication. Nowadays we know it's more like a gradient; like, we can agree something like the song of a whale is not language yet, but closer to it than the whimper of a dog, right?
Multimodality (or: how human language uses multiple channels at the same time, not just audio) is also something a bit obvious. Specially for those from cultures where gestures are common; you can convey multiple meanings through the same voice sentence, depending on the gestures and expressions you use.
Speaking on that: it always makes me roll my eyes when people compare sign languages with dancing bees. That's as silly as comparing voice languages with crickets, for roughly the same reasons.